Sep. 16, 2013
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Pianist Ilya Yakushev / Special to the Register

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Special to The Register

The pianist Ilya Yakushev shot up at the end of his performance Saturday with the Des Moines Symphony as if he’d just realized his piano bench were a red-hot stove. He’d blitzed through the final charge of Prokofiev’s blistering Piano Concerto No. 3 and was suddenly, spectacularly done.

Had he been a hip-hop star he might have dropped the mic and walked off stage. Yakushev: out.

Instead, he nodded humbly toward the audience’s roaring approval, gestured toward the orchestra, and returned to the keyboard for an encore, a silvery Chopin nocturne as different from the Prokofiev as could be.

The entire program, in fact, was a showcase of multiple personalities — all Russian (except that Chopin) but all over the emotional map. The helter-skelter Prokofiev arrived between Glinka’s exuberant overture to “Ruslan and Ludmilla” and an intensely lyrical reading of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. (The program repeats at 2:30 p.m. today.)

Maestro Joseph Giunta could have ordered easier repertoire to open his 25th season on the podium here at the Des Moines Civic Center, but he aimed high, and his orchestra rose to the challenge.

The Glinka overture sprinted out of the gate even as the audience took their seats after “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It was short, bright and lively.

The Prokofiev was more complicated. The score doesn’t have the same mammoth chords that Yakushev played here two years ago in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, but it has jaunty rhythms and more slippery scales than a largemouth bass. He handled them with apparent ease, sliding seamlessly from one mood to the next.

The orchestral parts are challenging, too, with wicked unison runs, abrupt interjections, and exposed flourishes of woodblocks and tambourine. There are endless opportunities to make mistakes, but the musicians made very few. Their only real snag was playing too loudly over the soloist during his higher passages toward the end. We saw his hands pounding away but heard very little.

Overall, the Rachmaninoff was the most satisfying. It, too, requires persnickety technique, but the pay-off is bigger, with surging waves of musical expression. The trick is to get 90-some musicians to gradually swell and shrink those waves together, and they did, clearing the way for beautiful solos from principal clarinetist Gregory Oakes and others.

Rachmaninoff published that score, by the way, in 1908, but the original manuscript disappeared for almost a century until it turned up in a cellar in Switzerland in 2004. It was expected to fetch $1 million at a London auction, but the composer’s grandson claimed ownership and blocked the sale.

One more money note: The Des Moines Symphony exceeded last season’s 75th anniversary goal to raise $7.5 million for the orchestra and its academy. The final count was $9.8 million, from more than 300 private and corporate donors.